The Gobbs 2012 Over Reaction

This has hit the media today. I’m appalled. Not at the video, but at the complete over reaction from some sections of the media. Initially I wasn’t interested. It seemed to be just another silly teenage video posted on Youtube. And it is exactly that. Teenagers being silly. But if you listen to some sections of the media, the video is pornographic and so bad they can’t show you the footage. I smelt moral panic and for that reason alone decided to track down the original. Here it is (it was removed within a few hours, not that you’re missing much). The reason I’m posting it is to dispel the moral panic.

Clearly these girls are joking. They are using a ridiculous slang term for oral sex, gobbs, and saying they will offer a gobb for 80 cents. The price of 80 cents ought to be enough to alert the viewer that this is a parody, a farce. At one point one of the girls says she will even lie on the floor with a muffin in her armpit. It’s absurd. That’s as risque as it gets. There’s no foul language, no explicit descriptions of oral sex or any other sex act, indeed nothing pornographic. Unless you find the word gobbs pornographic (it must be Adelaide slang because I’ve never heard the term before).

This is actually pretty mild stuff and exactly the type of thing teenagers joke about. It’s nothing new. I did it when I was the same age. In fact some our jokes were far more crude and explicit. In fact it’s so bland it should never have made the news.

Here we have to acknowledge the media’s role in beating up these stories. Yes, the girls were stupid for posting it on Youtube, but the larger responsibility belongs to adults in the media who should have decided not to run this as a story. It is, in the end, trivial, un-newsworthy. But no, this was too juicy. So they blurred the girls’ faces and disguised their voices and said it was too shocking to play – leaving us to guess the worst.

The most irresponsible of them all – to date – was the child psychologist interviewed on The Project. She was an utter idiot (I decided to write this after and so didn’t note her name at the time). She repeated three ridiculous and irresponsible myths.

1. That this video will be on the internet forever. 2. That future employers will not employ these girls because of the video. 3. That they made this video because their frontal lobes are not fully developed yet (this point alone ought to be grounds to have her disciplined by the Australian Psychological Society, she certainly shouldn’t be practicing as a child psychologist).